Thursday, February 9, 2017

Another school year begins -- and so does the politically correct insanity.

As the fall semester begins, parents, students, taxpayers and
donors should be made aware of official college practices that should
disgust us all.
Hampshire College will offer some of its
students what the school euphemistically calls "identity-based housing."
That's segregated housing for students who — because of their race,
culture, gender or sexual orientation — have "historically experienced
oppression." I'd bet the rent money that Hampshire College will not
offer Jewish, Irish, Polish, Chinese or Catholic students segregated
housing. Because there is no group of people who have not faced
oppression, Hampshire College is guilty of religious and ethnic
discrimination in its housing segregation policy.

One can only imagine the widespread media, political and
intellectual condemnation of Republicans and conservatives if, after the
inauguration of Barack Obama, they had gone on a violent and vicious
tear all over the nation as did Democrats and liberals after the
inauguration of President Donald Trump. They committed acts such as
assaulting Trump supporters, setting fires and stoning police. Suppose
Republicans/conservatives had carried signs that read “F—- Obama” or
talked about “blowing up the White House.” The news media, instead of
calling them protesters, would have labeled them evil racists,
obstructionists and everything else except a child of God. The reason
for the difference in treatment is simple. Republicans and conservatives
are held — and hold themselves — to higher standards of behavior. By
contrast, Democrats and liberals are held — and hold themselves — to
less civilized standards of behavior. Let’s look at some of the history
of conservative and liberal behavior.

WALTER WILLIAMS
President-elect Donald Trump’s threats against American
companies looking to relocate in foreign countries have won favorable
review from many quarters. Support comes from those alarmed about trade
deficits, those who want a “level playing field” and those who call for
“free trade but fair trade,” whatever that means.
Some American companies relocate in foreign lands because costs are
lower and hence their profits are higher. Lower labor costs are not the
only reason companies move to other countries.
Life Savers, a candy manufacturing company, was based in Holland,
Michigan, for decades. In 2002, it moved to Montreal. It didn’t move
because Canada had lower wages.

Claude Frederic Bastiat (1801-50) — a French classical liberal
theorist, political economist and member of the French National Assembly
— wrote an influential essay titled “That Which Is Seen and That Which
Is Not Seen.” Bastiat argued that when making laws or economic
decisions, it is imperative that we examine not only what is seen but
what is unseen. In other words, examine the whole picture.
Americans who support tariffs on foreign goods could benefit
immensely from Bastiat’s admonition. A concrete example was the Bush
administration’s 8 to 30 percent tariffs in 2002 on several types of
imported steel. They were levied in an effort to protect jobs in the
ailing U.S. steel industry. Those tariffs caused the domestic price for
some steel products, such as hot-rolled steel, to rise by as much as 40
percent. The clear beneficiaries of the steel tariffs were steel
industry executives and stockholders and the 1,700 or so steelworkers
whose jobs were saved. But there is no such thing as a free lunch or a
something-for-nothing machine. Whenever there is a benefit of doing
something, there is a guaranteed cost.

Although Donald Trump had good
inclinations on some foreign policy issues during his campaign and
transition period—for example, staying out of unneeded brushfire wars,
reexamining U.S. alliances, and pushing wealthy allies to do more for
their own security—his policy toward "radical Islamic terrorism" always
needed some work.
Now, having been president for only a short time, this
policy—including slamming the door shut on the legal immigration of
refugees (including desperate Syrians fleeing from the country's civil
war) and entry of people from seven predominantly Muslim countries—needs
a lot of work. In the meantime, to show that he is doing at least
something for Syrian refugees, he is talking to Arab allies not affected
by the ban—Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—about setting up
safe zones in Syria to keep refugees there.

Remember when I warned about the worrying signs that Filipino President Rodrigo "Dirty Harry" Duterte was setting up a police state, including deputizing the public to kill suspected criminals, threatening martial law if the judiciary tried to stop him and endorsing the killing of journalists? Well, to adopt the parlance of the millennial Buzzfeed set, you won't believe what happened next!
Actually, you will believe it. The Philippines has turned into a police state.
Specifically, Duterte himself had to halt his own self-declared war on drugs earlier this week because (who could've guessed it?!) the Filipino police had taken it as carte blanche to go on a kidnapping, murder and theft spree. A new report
on the killings alleges that the police "have behaved like the criminal
underworld they are supposed to be suppressing, taking payments for
killings and delivering bodies to funeral homes." It goes on to accuse
the Filipino "authorities" of a "systematic, planned and organized"
campaign of killings that could constitute a crime against humanity.

by James Corbettcorbettreport.com
As Corbett Reporteers will know by now, the Central Intelligence Agency
is one of the organs through which the deep state manipulates the overt
government in Washington. It is not without good cause that the
initials “CIA” have been said to refer to “Criminals In Action.”
And so the latest “release” of 930,000 documents from the CIA’s
archives needs to be treated with a healthy dose of realism. Criminals
generally do not advertise their criminality, let alone put those
advertisements in neatly organized, web-accessible databases for the
public to peruse.
For those not in the know, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12958
in 1995 mandating the automatic declassification of all historically
valuable government records older than 25 years (with “exemptions” for
all sorts of “national security” reasons, of course). This includes the
CIA, which in 2000 set up a system called “CREST” (CIA Records Search Tool) that the public can use to browse its declassified documents.

by Walter Williams |
Let’s look at the political angst over trade deficits. A trade
deficit is when people in one country buy more from another country than
the other country’s people buy from them. There cannot be a trade
deficit in a true economic sense. Let’s examine this.
I buy more from my grocer than he buys from me. That means I have a
trade deficit with my grocer. My grocer buys more from his wholesaler
than his wholesaler buys from him. But there is really no trade
imbalance, whether my grocer is down the street, in Canada or, God
forbid, in China.
Here is what happens: When I purchase $100 worth of groceries, my
goods account (groceries) rises, but my capital account (money) falls by
$100. For my grocer, it is the opposite. His goods account falls by
$100, but his capital account rises by $100. Looking at only the goods
account, we would see trade deficits, but if we included the capital
accounts, we would see a trade balance. That is true whether we are
talking about domestic trade or we are talking about foreign trade.

Nothing that Lenin or Stalin implemented in Soviet
Russia or Mao in China, for example, was not called for or implied in
Marx’s own writings and arguments. For the socialist horrors of the 20th century, there is only one verdict to be pronounced against Marx: guilty as charged.

Some people may have missed it on their calendar, but May 5th was
Karl Marx’s birthday. It is worth recalling, also, that there was a time
when Marx was an anti-communist.
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in the German Rhineland town of Trier, and died on March 14, 1883 in London.
It is said that by its fruit you will know the tree. The last one
hundred years is a clear testament to the consequences of Marx’s
influence on modern history.

Ludwig von Mises’s majestic magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, was published on September 14, 1949. In the nearly seven decades since its appearance, Human Action has come to be recognized as one of the truly great classics of modern economics.
Often a “classic” means a famous book considered to have made
important contributions to a discipline that is reverentially referred
to but is rarely ever read. In economics, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
is the typical example of such a work. Every economist has heard of the
“invisible hand” and the notion of self-interest furthering the public
interest through the incentive mechanism of the market, but probably few
economists nowadays have actually read more than a handful of snippets
and brief passages from Smith’s treatise.
However, Human Action uniquely stands out as a classic in the
literature of economics. Not only among Austrian economists but also for
a growing number of other people, Mises’s brilliant treatise continues
to be read and taken seriously as a cornerstone for understanding the
nature of the free society and the workings of the market economy.

Governments have an insatiable appetite for the wealth of their
subjects. When governments find it impossible to continue raising taxes
or borrowing funds, they have invariably turned to printing paper money
to finance their growing expenditures. The resulting inflations have
often undermined the social fabric, ruined the economy, and sometimes
brought revolution and tyranny in their wake.
The political economy of the French Revolution is a tragic example of
this. Before the revolution of 1789, royal France was a textbook
example of mercantilism. Nothing was produced or sold, imported or
exported, without government approval and regulation.

Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera accused Matt Drudge’s
website of “the worst kind of jingoistic rhetoric ever” for carrying
news stories about the dangers of illegal immigration. He said Drudge
“is doing his best to stir up a civil war. I mean, shame on Matt
Drudge.” Republican Rep. Todd Rokita and his Indiana delegation have
been criticized for suggesting the possibility that Latin American
children pouring across our southern border are carrying deadly
diseases. Some of them have already been discovered to be carrying lice
and suffering from disease. We’ve yet to find out what kind of
communicable diseases they could spread to American children when
schools across the country are forced to admit them.

Paul Craig Roberts

This article by Moon of Alabama is not conspiracy theory: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46056.htm Read it carefully. Check out the links.
The article is a documented and accurate description of a coup that
is underway. The extraordinary lies that are being perpetrated by the
media and by members of the US government have as their obvious purpose
the prevention of a Donald Trump presidency. There is no other reason
for the extraordinary blatant lies for which there is not a shred of
evidence. Indeed, there is massive real evidence to the contrary. Yet
the coup proceeds and gathers steam.

And the Liberal-Left Is Helping

Paul Craig Roberts
Reuters reports that 2,700 US troops accompanied by tanks are moving
across Poland toward the Russian border. Col. Christopher Norrie,
commander of the 3rd Armoured Brigade Combat Team, declared: “The main
goal of our mission is deterrence and prevention of threats.”
Apparently, the colonel is not sufficiently bright to realize that far
from preventing threats, the force he is leading presents as a threat.
And to no less a military power than Russia.

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Despite our best efforts, we in the American police state seem to be
stuck on repeat, reliving the same set of circumstances over and over
and over again: egregious surveillance, strip searches, police shootings
of unarmed citizens, government spying, censorship, retaliatory
arrests, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering,
indefinite detentions, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, etc.
Unfortunately, as a nation we’ve become so desensitized to the
government’s acts of violence, so accustomed to reports of government
corruption, and so anesthetized to the sights and sounds of Corporate
America marching in lockstep with the police state that few seem to pay
heed to the warning signs blaring out the message: Danger Ahead.
Remember, the Titanic received at least four warnings from other
ships about the presence of icebergs in its path, with the last warning
issued an hour before disaster struck. All four warnings were ignored.

Lately, there’s been a lot of rhetoric comparing Donald Trump to
Adolf Hitler. The concern is that a Nazi-type regime may be rising in
America.
That process, however, began a long time ago.
In fact, following the second World War, the U.S. government
recruited Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols, embraced his
mindset about law and order, implemented his tactics in incremental
steps, and began to lay the foundations for the rise of the Fourth
Reich.
Sounds far-fetched? Read on. It’s all documented.

A group of senators led by Lindsey Graham (R-SC),
and Ben Cardin (D-MD) plan to introduce legislation that would impose
strict new congressional oversight and veto power over the Trump
administration if it decided to lift sanctions on Russia.

According to a CNN report, if passed, the new bill
titled “The Russia Review Act” would require the White House to submit a
report detailing why it was seeking to lift sanctions, setting into
motion a 120-day review period where Congress could vote to disapprove
of easing the penalties.

When Barack Obama was still in office, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of the perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks, penned a letter to him.
Though a judge recently ruled that letter could be sent to the White
House before the outgoing president left office, the contents were to be
withheld from the public until a month later — until after President
Trump had assumed power.

This week, the Miami Herald obtained and published the contents of the 18-page letter,
originally written in 2015 and titled “LETTER FROM THE CAPTIVE MUJAHID
KHALID SHAIKH MOHAMMAD TO THE HEAD OF THE SNAKE, BARACK OBAMA, THE
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE COUNTRY OF OPPRESSION AND
TYRANNY.” It contains the Kuwait-born Pakistani terrorist’s insights
into why 9/11 occurred, as well as surprisingly accurate assessments of
American politics.

Many people, including some libertarians, may pooh-pooh the issue of
sexist language as mere political correctness (I previously wrote about
the issue of political correctness here).
But the American Psychological Association takes it seriously: several
decades worth of research back up the harm that it does, so using
allegedly generic terms like “he” or “man” to refer to people in general
is not allowed in any APA journal.

A case for the libertarian

Neither liberals nor conservatives recognize their inconsistencies

By Jeffrey Miron - - As
the American political scene becomes ever more polarized, citizens of
all political views have tired of both the liberal and conservative
perspectives. The two “mainstream” perspectives strike many as
inconsistent and hypocritical, and far more similar than different. Both
advocate large and intrusive government, albeit in different arenas,
despite rhetoric that claims otherwise.
What these disillusioned
Americans really want is libertarianism, which advocates small
government across the board. Misleading or one-sided characterizations
notwithstanding, libertarianism is precisely the “third way” that many
Americans desire.